SOURCE: “Goddess of Reason,” in Atlantic Monthly, November 1993, pp. 149-54.

In the following review, Rose finds The Beginning of the Journey to be a powerful, if at times unsettling, examination of self, marriage, and the intellectual circle.

A friend who reached the age of enthusiasm around 1960, like me, came to New York from the Midwest intoxicated by literature and, just to feel close to them, looked up Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin in the New York phone book. They were there! These gods were listed in the phone book! My friend felt awed and privileged to be in the same city. It was still the golden age of the New York Jewish intellectual. Deconstructionism had not yet arrived to unsettle forever our sense that art has something to tell us about life. The name Derrida had not sounded in the land. Novels were serious matters, and equally serious...